Can Come Back

The German experimental-rock group Can has never been obscure. Though not quite a household name here in the States, Can recorded several European hits in the years they were together, 1968 to 1979. They have also had an impact on a diverse group of musicians, from David Bowie to Brian Eno to Radiohead, and pioneered whole styles of music that their followers later expanded upon. This week, Mute Records releases “The Lost Tapes,” a three-CD box set containing over 180 minutes of previously unissued material. More than a great listen, the set solidifies both Can’s oeuvre and their approach to music making as far-reaching influences.

The concept for the band first came to Irmin Schmidt on a visit to New York in 1966. Based in Cologne, Germany, at the time, he was a composer and conductor in the contemporary-classical New Music scene and a disciple of Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. As Schmidt explains, he had come to the United States to participate in the Dimitri Mitropolous conducting competition, but “once in New York, I met La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and I became much more interested in what they were doing.” The two American minimalists created long, drony, repetitive pieces strikingly different from the music Schmidt had been involved in, and he participated in some of their performances. (“I played with Terry for hours,” he says.) But what really struck Schmidt about the New Yorkers he met then was a mind-set that had not yet reached Europe: “They didn’t make a difference between high and low culture — between pop and art.” It was the era of Warhol, after all.

This progressive attitude led Schmidt to reconsider his own approach to music. Instead of conducting, he eventually decided to start a band that would “bring together jazz and rock with the openness of New Music.” In Cologne, Schmidt began playing keyboards with the core musicians that would eventually form Can: his fellow Stockhausen student Holger Czukay on bass; Michael Karoli, a young rock- and gypsy-music-influenced pupil of Czukay’s, on electric guitar; and the inhumanly precise jazz-trained drummer Jaki Liebezeit. Over the years, singers would come and go — most significantly, the African-American visual artist Malcolm Mooney and the wayfaring Japanese hippie Kenji “Damo” Suzuki — who each added a unique element to the music. An important principle underscored Can’s collaborative spirit: “There was no hierarchy, no single composer,” Schmidt says. “We all created together.”

In keeping with the notion of fusing high and low culture, Can took avant-garde techniques from Stockhausen and John Cage, and combined them with the rock ‘n’ roll energy of the Velvet Underground, the Beatles, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix. (“‘Hey Joe’ was a revelation,” Schmidt says.) To these they added syncopated rhythms inspired by James Brown and took cues from Miles Davis’s cutting-edge experiments in jazz fusion. But despite these influences, there is something truly sui generis about Can’s music. Their “instant composition” approach to songwriting — they would improvise in their studio, Inner Space, for hours at a time; record everything they played; and then edit the most interesting passages into songs — ensured a unique sound that was constantly changing. Early releases, like “Monster Movie,” had a stripped-down, garage-rock quality, but over time, Can put out longer, more free-form music, like “Tago Mago”’s textural, sprawling “Aumgn” and the “Future Days” LP. In their later years, they refocused and became more dancey and rhythm-driven, as on their biggest hit, the disco-fied “I Want More,” from 1976.

Listen to a song by Can, here:

“A Swan is Born” by Can

Through the years, Can constantly recorded, and edited songs out of these sessions, though not everything would make it onto an album. They amassed an archive of finished but unissued material. “You’d forget it,” Schmidt says of this material. “You’d put it in the archive and then it would become more and more forgotten.” Ultimately, these unreleased tapes sat for decades. Though Schmidt was aware of them, they contained 50 hours’ worth of music and were in such chronological disarray that he put off the task of listening to them. Finally, a few years ago, he had the tapes cleaned and digitized, and eventually began going through them. What he discovered was recordings from every era of the band’s existence — disremembered songs featuring Mooney, Suzuki or other singers; short instrumentals; and long collages of the soundtracks they had created for films. Several of those come from the same improvisations that produced some of Can’s classic early-’70s songs: “Dead Pigeon Suite,” for example, offers a much different version of Ege Bamyasi’s “Vitamin C,” and “Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light” — the soundtrack to the West German TV series “Das Messer” — is an expanded take on the band’s hit single “Spoon,” from 1971.

“What I quite like about what I found,” Schmidt says, “is that it tells something about the process of making the music.” Indeed, some of the tracks on “The Lost Tapes” offer early run-throughs of ideas that Can would revisit and expand into finished songs — like “On the Way to Mother Sky,” which he says is an embryonic, vocal-less form of the epic “Mother Sky,” later sung by Suzuki on the “Soundtracks” album. “When we played — when we started improvising — an idea came up that we would repeat and build on. That process of approaching a perfect song,” Schmidt says, “is very interesting.”